Assetto Corsa Competizione

Assetto Corsa Competizione, the new official game of the BLANCPAIN GT SERIES, an official grand touring racing series, named after world-renowned Swiss watch manufacture Blancpain and organized by SRO Motorsports Group, will be speeding onto Steam Early Access this summer.

Featuring an extraordinary level of simulation quality that allows players to experience the unique atmosphere of this GT3 Series, players can compete against official drivers, teams, cars and circuits with the highest level of accuracy and attention to detail.

Taking full advantage of Unreal Engine 4, Assetto Corsa Competizione will ensure the highest quality rendering with photorealistic weather conditions and graphics to reach a new standard in driving realism and immersion racing. Players will experience highspeed torque as they get behind the wheel of luxurious speedsters including Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens and many other prestigious GT cars reproduced with an outstanding level of detail. Motion capture technology is used to create the animations of mechanics and drivers in an even more realistic fashion and guarantee a high level of player engagement during races, pit stops and driver changes.

In the final version of the game, players can expect advanced multiplayer functionality with Assetto Corsa Competizione, including a ranking system which will evaluate individual performance and driving behavior to reward the most virtuous drivers and promote fair play in online competitions.

​Taking full advantage of Unreal Engine 4, Assetto Corsa Competizione will ensure the highest quality rendering with photorealistic weather conditions and graphics to reach a new standard in driving realism and immersion racing

"Stefano Casillo" schrieb:

Physics was one of the very few things we could salvage and bring over
from AC1 to ACC moving to UE4, everything else needs to be redone from
scratch.

So from any point of view you can consider ACC physics as a direct
evolution of AC1 physics with the added bonus of not having 170+ cars to
update and check if we decide to make substantial changes.... this is
giving me, Aris and the new physics dev that joined us Fernando the
opportunity to get in pretty hard in some areas and make some
substantial changes that we couldn't afford to do with a big released
product like AC1.

We'll have plenty of time to dig into the details of it both before the
EA and after, I'll just drop one big one here tho. Although it's not
really something we'll see fully utilized in ACC because of the nature
of the tracks we are going to include but the physics engine is now
running full blown 64bit math all around, so, as far the physics is
concerned, there are virtually no limits to how big a track could be, we
could literally race to Mars and back without suffering much precision
losses in the calculations... again, not really something that will
create a huge change in ACC but still a thing I can geek out and be
happy about

- There will be 10 circuits (you can find them on the Blancpain calendar)

- Official leaderboards (basically RSR inside the game)

- Ranking system for both skill and safety similar to iRacing (he
mentions the latest GranTurismo's one). They hired the guy behind
Minorating for this

- They will follow their philosophy, so the handling will be realistic (as it was in AC)

- Tyre model, aero and suspension geometry will be improved thanks to
new developers that have been hired in the last year (one of them is
also a mechanical engineer)

- ACC will be more versatile and easier to use for people with less experience (which doesn't mean less realism)

Pricing & release

- Early Access (beta version) at a lower price than the release one

- No release date announced, not even approximately

On Unreal Engine 4

- Choice of UE4 was driven by desire of focusing on the features that
were lacking in AC1, basically "gameplay features" like implementing the
various RL regulations, better career mode, better AI etc. (He supports
this decision by saying that Kunos' competitors, even though with a way
bigger workforce, have decided to avoid writing an Engine by
themselves)

- They have worked 8 months during 2017 on R&D testing the Unreal
Engine, Marco says that it has been an huge risk because they still
didn't know if UE4 was the right choice. He mentions as an example the
need to do separate renders for the mirrors, which they had trouble to
implement initially as UE4 engine is "general" and not geared towards
sim use. This required weeks of telemetry of how it works, how it uses
CPU/GPU etc.

- The assets needed some rework as well, in order to be optimized for
the different engine (as a result of the aforementioned analysis)

- They will also probably use UE4 for their future projects

- He praises the photorealism of the Unreal Engine, even though some
months were needed before both the eye candy and the framerate started
to get to the desired level

- They took some inspiration on how to solve some issues they had from
videos of other games made with the Unreal Engine, mainly the ones made
by Milestone

On collaboration between real racing teams & Blancpain

- With this license they are going to have an even stronger collaboration between Kunos and drivers/racing teams

- They will be at many racing weekends in order to gather data from the teams

- Many teams use AC for the training of their pilots. Some of the teams also asked them some advice to build their own simulator

- Many drivers asked Kunos help to setup simulators in order to train for new tracks, for example

- They received numerous eSports contacts, but for the moment they are
focusing on the development of the game. (Based on the way he talked
about this, I believe esports will come)

- Kunos is working on a connection between virtual and real Blancpain
(for example ideal time laps vs real ones, plus something similar to RSR
with invitations to the races for the fastest guys, he mentions
GranTurismo's Academy)

What is Assetto Corsa Competizione?
Assetto Corsa Competizione is our all-new racing simulation that
reproduces the Blancpain GT Series Championship managed by SRO and based
on the GT3 homologation. ACC is not an additional module or an
extension of Assetto Corsa but a different, new and separate product
altogether!

Is AC Competizione a spin-off of Assetto Corsa?
Absolutely not! We are developing AC Competizione from scratch. It takes
advantage of the Blancpain GT experience, know-how and data collection
acquired while working on AC. However, AC Competizione is not AC
featuring the Blancpain GT Series. It is a completely new game that will
offer realistic car handling as well as new features and gameplay not
seen before in our products.

Will AC Competizione be available on PC Steam only, or on console too?
Right now, all our efforts are going into developing Assetto Corsa Competizione on Steam, during Early Access.

Does AC Competizione use the UE4 Engine’s physics?
AC Competizione will feature an evolution of the physics engine already
used in Assetto Corsa, completely independent from UE4’s built in
physics.

What is going to happen to Assetto Corsa now you’re working on Competizione?
The game will continue to be available for purchase, servers for
multiplayer and lobbies will be kept open and active for as long as
people continue to play it. The game will not receive further updates
now (It has now been 7 years since AC development started and 4 years
from its 1.0 release) Our entire team is now focused on AC Competizione.

Why the Blancpain GT Series? What does make it so special?
When we started to figure out what the new AC would have to be, we saw
that -including AC- the current generation of racing games offers a huge
variety of “generic” titles performing multiple race modes with any
kind of cars. This usually results in finding a compromise in terms of
score, racing rules, gameplay modes etc.

On the other side, very few games are dedicated to a specific race
series that can be completely simulated in all its detail and, more
importantly, can keep gamers focused.

Whenever we’ve asked the community for their opinion, GT racing was
always on the top of their wish list, and we found that the Blancpain GT
Series fits the bill! Featuring Sprint races, endurance, night racing,
driver swaps, official teams and drivers, these are exactly the things
our fans asked for! Not to mention the best GT cars available, in their
racing outfit, that results in lightness, handling, grip and brake
power. Add to this formula the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, and you
get the best thrilling GT racing series ever.

Will we see a day / night cycle in Assetto Corsa Competizione?
Yes – Players will be able to race at any time of the day, thanks to a realtime, full day / night cycle.

What are the recommended system requirements for Assetto Corsa Competizione?
Our minimum target specification is currently an i5-2500/AMD FX-8100 or
equivalent, 4 GB RAM and NVIDIA Geforce GTX 760. However, right now,
it’s way too early to be more precise. Over time, we’ll be able to be
more specific later as we continue to develop ACC. Therefore, if you are
considering upgrading your hardware configuration, we strongly suggest
you wait for our Early Access before upgrading.

Will Assetto Corsa Competizione be moddable? And will modders be able to port their work onto AC Competizione?
Assetto Corsa’s structure was designed from the beginning to be
moddable. Being developed with UE4, AC Competizione processes data and
assets through a completely different structure and file format.
Therefore, the game will not be compatible with mod contents created for
Assetto Corsa. Also, our team does not have enough experience with UE4
to tackle both the development a brand-new game and the challenges of
supporting an open platform in the time frame available for this
project.

We are fully aware of the importance of modding and its contribution to
the success of Assetto Corsa. It’s a great way for new talents to
emerge, for the community to “suggest” new directions and/or simply to
make a product richer. It is not a coincidence that some of the best
community members are now contributing with us to the evolution of the
software.

However, for ACC this element will have to be put in stand-by mode for a
series of reasons. The most important one is that we have given
ourselves an enormous task of rebuilding, once again our software from
(almost) scratch. In a world where pretty much, every product you see on
the market in simracing is an evolution of games that have been on the
market 10-15 years ago, our approach is to get a big axe and reset
things to (almost) zero before starting with a new project. ACC is no
exception.

In this case the task is rendered more complex by the fact that we are
using, for the first time a third party engine that we did not design
ourselves and the truth is, given the amount of time we have available
to deliver ACC to the public, we have more than enough on our hands
trying to figure out how to use the engine effectively to also think
about how to make the platform moddable.

As you can imagine, this has been source of endless discussions in the
last year and half as every decision comes with pros and cons, there is
going to be pain no matter what your final call will be. It goes without
saying that we believe we made the right call even if that means losing
the huge benefits of a moddable platform.

We know this might not cover everything, but over time we will continue
to answer your most frequently asked questions! Once again, we want to
thank our community for the outpour of support you’ve shown us since our
announcement last week. We absolutely cannot wait to tell you more
about Assetto Corsa Competizione in the near future!